- [Voiceover] So this video is about the short answer
section on the AP U.S. history exam.
So this is a real practice problem from the AP exam
and I'd like to go through it step-by-step with you
to give you an idea of how to approach
these problems really well.
So each of the short answer problems is
three questions long and they all discuss
one facet of American history.
And so your job in these questions is not
to try to write an essay,
but merely to just answer A, B, and C,
which will be related to each other,
and you have about the front of one
blue book page to do this,
so really no more than 200 words.
And what's great about these
is that there are many right answers.
They're asking you to display your knowledge
about a topic in the past,
but what parts of that knowledge you display
is up to you.
So that means you can really play to your strengths.
Bring up the thing that you know.
You don't have to worry about knowing everything.
Just enough to answer a few questions.
So let's read this question and we're gonna
read it really carefully,
which you'll see is important for a number of reasons.
So answer A. B, and C.
A, "Briefly explain one example of how contact
"between Native Americans and Europeans
"brought changes to Native American societies
"in the period 1492 to 1700."
Now this is really important.
Making sure that you know the date range
that you're being asked to write about
is really key to giving a good answer
because we could talk about Native American
history in American society really right up to the present,
so 1700 is our end date.
B, "Briefly explain a second example of how contact
"between Native Americans and Europeans
"brought changes to Native American societies
"in the same period."
And C, "Briefly explain one example of how
"Native American societies resisted change
"brought by contact with Europeans in the same period."
All right, so basically what we're being asked here
is to give two examples of change
and one example of resistance to that change.
Now the way I see it,
we have one really important stricture
like I mentioned already,
which is that we can only talk about the period
in-between European contact and the year 1700.
So that means a lot of things that you might
want to be talking about from the 1800s and 1900s
you can't here, because you won't get credit for it.
So we're talking about the period long before
the American Revolution,
long before even the French and Indian War,
Seven Years' War.
So this is really early contact.
But the question actually doesn't give any strictures
about societies,
so we could talk about Native Americans
in North America at large,
we could talk about Native Americans in Jamestown,
or we could talk about Native Americans in Mexico.
We could talk about Native Americans
and the French in the Northwest Territories,
so our geography is really broad here.
It's our timeline that's relatively short.
So let's brainstorm what we could talk about
for answers A or B.
Well, we could mention,
I think an excellent example would be disease.
Native Americans experienced an epidemic
of disease related to pathogens brought over by Europeans,
so you could talk about disease really reshaped society,
particularly there were morning wars
in the Northeast,
where Native Americans would raid New England
settlements trying to find replacements for the people
who had died in disease.
You could also talk about trade
and for example horses
might be a good example of this.
The Spanish brought horses to the New World,
which completely changed the form
of transportation and wealth for a lot
of Native American societies on the Great Plains.
What else could we talk about?
Well, we could also mention labor.
The Spanish tried to implement a system
of encomienda labor,
which would grant land to the Spanish
for Native Americans to labor upon
in a system of slavery.
You might also talk about gender roles
and intermarriage between
Native Americans and Europeans
which changed racial patterns
and created new racial caste systems
and also changed the way that women
were often viewed in Native American societies,
often resulting in them having less power
than they did before the Europeans arrived.
When you're thinking about how to answer
these types of questions,
one of the most useful things you can do
is think about race,
class and gender.
These are things that historians think about
all the time,
and what they mean by these things is to say
how does a certain issue affect
say white people differently than it might
affect black people?
Or Native American people
differently than it might affect Europeans?
Or does this affect rich people
more than it affects poor people?
And that might also include people who
own a factory, for example,
versus the people who work in a factory
or labor in a factory.
And lastly, you might think about whether
something affects men or women differently
or people of different gender expressions or sexualities.
So if you're stuck on what to write,
take some time to think about how a certain event
may have affected anyone in these three groups
differently than another group.
All right, so we answered the first two questions,
and you'll see that any one of these
is a perfectly appropriate answer
and you only have to talk about one for each.
And for each of these I would really only
just write one sentence.
Make sure that that sentence gets at the heart
of what it is that you're trying to say.
For example, don't just write, "Disease,"
but rather write a sentence that says,
"The introduction of pathogens brought
"from the Old World to the New affected
"Native American societies by drastically
"reducing their populations and their settlement patterns."
All right, let's pause here for now
and in the next video we'll tackle part C.